Chimacum Middle School 6th grade students blogging about solutions to the problems facing our world. This blog was inspired by classroom discussions where students came up with the idea to share their thoughts and ideas through a blog!

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Well, chances are what's now stuck in between your teeth traveled thousands of miles to get to your grocery store. So in our class we did an activity to see how far food travels. There were several choices of food cards to pick, the catch was we had no idea where the food displayed on the card came from. So once we had picked the primitive food card we flipped it over to see where it was from and what company produces it. Some food was from local farms, but some were from places across the world. We had to determine how far the food traveled, and then added it all up. In the end, our healthy lunch had traveled 9,520.8 miles!!!! That's putting out 35,226.96 pounds of CO (Carbon Monoxide) into the earth.

You see on each card lets take fruits and veggie cards for example, both cards looked identical on the front, one choice was an apple. So say there was you chose one of the apple cards. As I implied, there were two apples, so after we picked one apple card we turned it around, it was from New Zealand!!!! The other identical apple card was locally grown in Redmond Washington!!! There's a big difference in miles from New Zealand to Seattle compared to Redmond to our local grocery store. Buying locally might be more expensive but it's much better for our carbon footprint, it reduces the amount of CO we put into our atmosphere, and chances are if you have seen where your food is raised or grown you will know what's in between your teeth.
by Ava

Thursday, March 17, 2016

Lots of kids grow up hearing “Don’t give up!” or “Try your best!”. Those things may just seem like things your parents say, a simple encouragement and not that sincere. Right? Well wrong! Because they are actually important life lessons, now that sounds kind of deep, but really it’s quite simple. For example if we all really took “Don’t give up” seriously there would be no High School dropouts or in extreme cases Suicide. That’s a very extreme level but it’s technically true. You see there are two ways of looking at the world, or in other words, two different mindsets. A growth mindset is when you're not afraid to look dumb or get something wrong, you try hard and don’t give up. Then there is a fixed mindset where if you are not completely sure of, say an answer on your test you will give up because you don’t want to look stupid. So you must be thinking, well ok but what does this have to do with world problems? Here's the answer. Right now there are so many homeless and unemployed people, and let's face it it’s probably because they didn’t get a good education. But if we all work hard in school and aren’t afraid to take risks or challenges we will get good educations!!! It’s not easy to have a growth mindset, but work on it, you will see that it is a very important skill.by Ava

Here's a video one of our 6th-grade students made to share how he handles stuttering!

Monday, March 7, 2016

Hi this is Jayson here, let's have some ideas about how to solve world problems that could lead to our planet's death. I’ll start, here are some ideas:

First, we can not have trash in our ocean and we can change that by making it illegal to throw trash into water.

Second, we could have police officers on every corner near the water making sure that nobody throws trash in the water, if they throw trash into water they could be arrested and fined; like a $1,000,000. If they do it again then they will go to prison for 20 years.

We need to save our world and by the way we all need to come together. We need to save our world and we could pick up after ourselves.
by Jayson

Thursday, March 3, 2016

You know that trash you probably just threw out your car window a few hours ago? Do you know what happened to it? No? Let me walk you through what probably happened. First, you're driving along that road that probably had all that trash there already and it's sunny so all your windows are open. You’re eating some fast food on the go because you didn’t have time to stop and eat breakfast and your fast food wrappers start to flap their way around your car and they fly out the window. After that, the wrapper, along with the other trash on that road, get blown down the street towards a bridge. Under that bridge is a river or creek so, when the trash falls into that creek the current takes it along to where its opens up to the ocean. Then, that garbage floats out to sea and joins the big island of trash in the ocean.

That is likely what happened to that trash you dropped. So, next time you decide to leave your trash on the side of a street or highway remember how much of the Earth the ocean takes up and where it's going to go beyond that street.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

How does water pollution happen, why does it happen, those are all questions people have. If we cannot stop water pollution the water animals will either die of toxins from the litter or die from eating the litter or getting the litter stuck on them. If we could just recycle our plastics and put things that can be in a compost bin instead of throwing everything in the trash because eventually that will end up in our waters killing our water animals.

What would you rather have a world with no trash in the water or a world with trash in the water?

Think about that next time you throw away something that can be recycled or that can go in a compost bin that it will end up in the waters killing animals every day.
by Isaac

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Racism, is a real problem. It has been going on for centuries. There should be NO difference in the way someone is treated due to skin color. Wars have been started, people have died, all because of their skin tone. Nowadays there are laws to stop and prevent racism, but not everybody follows them. Right now the presidential debate is going on, and there are some very racist things being said, stuff like, “We're going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it!” I may just be a kid, and this may just be a blog, and Donald Trump will probably never read this, but you know what, that’s ok, because I have shared my message and if people still love and respect him that’s ok. But I know my point has been made and opinion proved. Your race, your nationality, your gender, your religion, your skin color it should have nothing to do with the way someone treats of you, it certainly should have NO effect on the way someone values you.by Ava